Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Misremembered:
We
celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr's birth to commemorate all he did
for racial justice. What we forget is that only after he started
advocating economic justice for the poor that he was gunned down.

Subscriptions:
Remember last week when you opened up the 'invoice' from Better
Barbecuing that reminded you to pay for a subscription that you
didn't order and didn't want? Well go check the front porch and see
if Amazon has delivered something it thinks you might want to order.
Anticipatory forestallment. Based on the NSA-like quantity of data
Amazon (and Google and on and on) have about you and your habits,
Amazon says it can box and ship products to you so that they are on
their way before you order them. Let's wait and see who has to pay
for the returns. Or who is so spacey they think they must have
ordered the stuff and so they pay for it. Oh, wait, it's already
been charged against the credit card you have on file. Convenient. Ah,
Progress:
When a priest in Pennsylvania was arrested
for grabbing a man's genitals, the Archdiocese was quick to point out
that the “arrest
did not involve a minor.” If
You Give A Mouse A Basic Income:
Research shows that if you give the poor enough money to live on,
their lives are better, the lives of their children are better, crime
goes down in their communities while educational achievement rises.
Health improves and mental health improves tremendously. And it saves
the government money in the long run by reducing the need for other
social service spending. For
the Love of Money:
We don’t give deference to people who hoard Kleenex boxes or old
newspapers. Why is money different? - Lambert
Strether

A
Sweet Deal:
About 40% of US healthcare dollars go to treat conditions caused by
too much sugar in the American diet. That's about a trillion dollars
a year. Want to guess how many taxpayer dollars the US government
spends on price supports and other programs to enrich the sugar
industry? (Don't count whatever our isolation of Cuba costs.)

Innovation:
Those
clever folks in Silicon Valley are applying all their creatively to
preventing the G20 from closing the international tax loopholes that
allow them to make a farce of national tax laws. They claim that
taxes would blunt tSelf-hoisting
Petard:
The NSA doesn't seem to like it when their view of the way the world
should be – no secrets, everything and everybody monitored 24/7 –
is applied to them. Just ask Edward Snowden.

The
Wheels On The Bus:
the richest 85 people on the globe – who between them control as
much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together
– could squeeze onto a single London double-decker bus. The top 1%
have $110
trillion in assets.
That's 46% of all the wealth in the world. And that's not right.
There is absolutely no way to morally justify such rapaciousness,
not while a single child goes to bed hungry, anywhere in the world.

Overreach:
The headlines proclaim that Deutsche Bank suffered a pre-tax loss of
1.15 billion euros in 4Q2013. What they don't mention is that
despite all the fines and private settlements and litigation losses –
amounting to 2.3 billion euros - the bank ended up with a 2.07
billion euro profit, up from less than a billion last year and about
300 million the year before. Poor babies.

Freedom
To / Freedom From:
Some Arizona Republican legislators are pushing a bill that would
allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people, unmarried women
and non-Christians. The claim this “modest clarification” is
needed to clarify the state’s religious-freedom law to
make sure their version of morality is imposed on society at large. Perspective:
It might help clarify things if you recall that the government that
surveilled Martin Luther King, Jr in attempt
to destroy his effectiveness is the same bunch that is telling us
now that we should trust them. J. Edgar didn't die, he just moved to
Fort Meade.

"A Sweet Deal" is a curious post for a number of reasons: #1 it is interesting to see the financial community finally taking note of the epidemiology of obesity and heart disease but #2 the COMPLETE OBFUSCATION as is found in the section 1. in the Credit Suisse report on the page titled Medical Research which states "Fructose and Glucose are essentially the same" is depressing

This is so glaringly false in so many ways it is sadly pathetic in its representation of the authors and the bank that financed the report. They are two totally different chemical compounds and are processed by two very different pathways in the Liver and it is this difference that is one of The if not THE underlying cause of the "problems with sugar."

I recommend you find the video presentation (online as YouTube but also from UCSF School of Medicine) titled "Sugar: The Bitter Truth." The biochemistry of both Glucose and Fructose is presented cogently and thoroughly.

I also recommend you read "Fat Chance" by Dr. R. Lustig who is a Pediatric Endocrinologist at UCSF and who has been caring for obese individuals, especially children, for virtually his entire career.

Folks: ITS THE FRUCTOSE. In Dr. Lustig's words "We've been Fructed!" The food industry is well aware of this and I suspect the American medical establishment is as well (particularly the younger MD's). Since the food industry controls the Congress NOTHING will change in the manner that it has so recently in Sweden where the Fat - Heart Disease relationship has been declared false.

Thanks Dr King, that can be one of those litttle items that hangs up the debate.

Prepared foods just seem to be, if not possesed by the devil, prepared with the failings of human anatomy in mind. Too much Sugar and Salt has been a problem since canning came around, and that skips over the problem they had with Lead.

I am shocked that the technical industry is trying to move heaven and earth to minimize their tax bill. It never worked out for anyone else (HAHA!).

The porn graph could be imbedded into the Wheels on the Bus item. We have the world that the rich wanted, funny how it quits working past a certain point. Glad I'm not a Walton.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.